On today’s date in 1996, Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the San Francisco Symphony in the first performance of this music, a five-minute toccata for orchestra entitled “Lost and Found.” Its composer was Steve Mackey, an American whose music Tilson Thomas has championed and recorded. Mackey writes:

“On more than one occasion Michael has used the word ‘wacky’ to describe my music. Composers usually blanch at such attributions—nobody wants to be captured in a single word—but I can live with ‘wacky.’ It is not a common adjective, does not end with ‘ism,’ and clearly the rhyme with my last name personalizes it. My music tends to explore fringe modes of consciousness rather than brand-name emotion or logical thought.”

Mackey also avoids conventional titles for his works. His Concerto for Electric Guitar and Orchestra is entitled “Tuck and Roll,” and among his other orchestral works can be found “Banana/Dump Truck” and “Eating Greens.” Mackey says:

“Greater thinkers than I have stumbled at the task of explaining humor, but my best guess, as it pertains to my music, is that it lies in the relationship of the music to the physical world. I think a lot about momentum, inertia, and even gravity. Allowing the music to get stuck and tip over, lurch headlong, tumble with limbs akimbo as well as to move fluidly gives it a ‘road runner’ cartoon kind of physicality, a fantasy, but not completely unhinged from the physical world.”